Identity theft has continued to grow, and the extent of the problem is significant. Each year, millions of adults in the U.S. have their identities stolen and tens of millions of accounts are compromised, leading to losses from identity theft in the billions. While the fraud losses themselves are significant, even more worrisome has been the negative impact to enterprises whose consumers have been victim to these breaches. Account churn, lower transaction volume and even lower stock prices have made the extent of the losses harder to bear for most enterprises.
Given the impact of identity theft on online businesses and the regulatory guidance around strengthening authentication, more and more enterprises are evaluating authentication options for their online consumer base. Weak authentication has led to Internet identity theft, phishing, and on-line financial fraud. As more consumers use computers and mobile devices for shopping, managing their finances, and accessing health care information, the risk of fraud and identity theft increases.
For many years, enterprises have used strong authentication to secure employee and business-partner access to corporate networks and applications. The risk of enabling unauthorized access to corporate assets justified the investment and change in behavior needed to deploy strong authentication and made for a fairly straightforward risk/reward evaluation for the enterprise. However, because these enterprise solutions were designed for lower volume deployments, utilizing them for securing consumer applications is not entirely feasible. Scaling these enterprise authentication solutions to millions of users in a cost effective manner is nearly impossible.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method to improve identity protection for consumers.